


Nothing More Frightful than Infinity

by JanitorBot



Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X, Rockman Zero | Mega Man Zero, Rockman | Mega Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Divergence, Gen, Shit ton of spoilers omg, and declared to the horizon, def some angst in there lol, i played the games, i think, if you squint you'll find gay robot implications, looked at canon, screw this ima write a fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 04:25:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14394258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JanitorBot/pseuds/JanitorBot
Summary: Omega is dead, Neo Arcadia’s reign of terror is over, and X‘s place in this world is gone. Still there’s one thing X has to do. After all, the concept of Copy X was not original.





	Nothing More Frightful than Infinity

**Author's Note:**

> After 3000 years later, I'm finally playing the Rockman Zero games and I'm just...god I love the idea behind the story but the story itself...personally has a lot of problems imho. And since I'm full of feels I thought, eh, why not. I'm less of a fanfic writer and more of a self-inflicting angst machine and the occasional epic storyline imagineer, but the feels need to go somewhere damn it. Not beta'ed.

Omega is defeated. The Mother Elf is finally free. A new dawn shines over a tired, battered Neo Arcadia, which can’t really be called a city at this point.

His body destroyed. His guardians dead. Without a solid leader, the various factions among the Neo Arcadians will quickly turn against each other in a desperate survival of the fittest to possess the most of the limited resources. The clever ones will flee from the city before it all goes down into hell. And that’ll all happen before Weil gets his claws on remaining scraps of it and push forward his agenda. X wouldn’t put it past that excuse of a human to seek vengeance on the very city that exiled him.

It’s terrible, X thinks unfeelingly, how after everything he has done to create a safe haven for innocent people, how little he cares for its quickly approaching destruction.

But he has the horrible habit of helping people like automatic subroutine, so he quietly follows the leftover members of the Resistance, including Ciel and Zero, back to their base. Those two are the only ones in this world he can feel something like fondness for now.

“You’re not gone,” Zero says almost like a question when he sees X’s ghostly form static in the corner of the maintenance room.

Well, it used to be the maintenance room that doubled as a medical and a recharge space for reploids, but the Weil possessed reploids have damaged nearly all useful equipment. With all the functioning personnel still diligently attending to the injured above surface, Zero and X are the only ones standing in this graveyard of a once busy clinic.  

“Not yet,” the cyber elf replies softly watching Zero nonchalantly steeping over various spillages, glass, burnt metal and the occasional robot limb. “I truly don’t have as much energy as I used to. I will leave this world, and when that time comes, I trust you to protect it. I want to do all I can for you and everyone else until then.”

Not to mention there is one other thing besides Ciel’s research direction that he wants to keep an eye out for.

Zero’s eyes narrow before he looks to one of the three unbroken capsules lined against the back wall of the room.

“Just because your body is gone doesn’t mean you should follow it. I’ll ask Ciel if she can find a way to help you.”

 _She won’t be able to in time_ , X didn’t say. Instead the cyber elf smiles amicably as Zero lies down in a capsule, the machine groaning as it puts itself together around its warrior.

*

Even though it is now common knowledge that the pioneer behind Neo Arcadia’s ironfisted regime was a fake of X, the trauma is still very fresh. It also doesn’t help how unnatural X is: a cyber-elf that hasn’t vanished after using its power? Just like the Dark Elf, the one other cyber elf that has the same survivability.

So despite X giving bits of advice to the various Resistance members, progress goes slow. They’re still wary of him. Still as the Resistance members salvage through their old base and transfer surviving supplies and equipment into caravans to have more mobility, X shares his knowledge whether they’ll accept it or not and usually they do (though that’s most likely because they’re following Zero and Ciel’s example and they listen to everything he says).

“Look down. You’re stepping over a 100K potentiometer. Cerveau will find use in that.”

“Don’t go to the Forest of Dysis. There are still plenty of rogue mechanaloids there and the potential rewards are not worth the risk. Go southwest instead. You’ll find less enemies and more valuable resources there.”

“If you scour around this area of the desert, you’ll find a cluster of Condoroids. No, don’t avoid it. Gather a group and snipe their heads simultaneously from afar. Their models have small subtank storages in their abdomens. They’ll be useful in case your rations go low.”

And of course - 

“Oh Zero, that’s sweet of you. But please give your energy crystals to Ciel’s cyber elves. They’re children and need more care than I do.”

The red reploid unceremoniously crushes the protective tank that contains a crystal in front of X’s form, the released energy immediately draws into X’s form like a force of gravity.

X sighs. This Zero would listen to everything X has to say except anything concerning the cyber elf’s health. “Now that was a waste. This is only delaying the inevitable.”

“That was the plan,” Zero says with no room for argument. 

Zero briskly walks up to an operator, demands to be transferred to an old cyber elf research facility, and teleports out within minutes.

X stares at the Trans Server a little longer before a soft voice interrupts his reverie.

“You’re the only thing from his past that he has left. Can you really blame him for trying?”

The cyber elf glances to his side to see Ciel walking towards him.

“He knows me less than he knows you,” X answers quietly so only the scientist can hear him. “Once I’m gone, he’ll be free to be his own and he’ll be better for it.”

Ciel smiles as she tilts her head, eyes looking down respectfully. She stills sees X as her hero, but she's not afraid to voice her opinion. Good girl. “Indeed his hibernation sickness has taken a great majority of his memories away, but that doesn’t mean his feelings left with them. You were best friends, weren’t you? It’s not easy to take away that kind of history from a long nap.”

“No Ciel, you don’t understand,” X sighs. “What this Zero has aren’t memories of me as much as leftovers simulations of me that haven’t been successfully deleted during his manufacturing. And what he feels for me is the result of a dependency link program. I have no history with this reploid.”

The young scientist freezes. “What are you saying? Dependency link program? X, can you please explain…?”

Finally, X wearily turns his head to look into her confused blue eyes. He’s made his decision.

They deserve to know the truth.

*

It seems that Weil is staying low for now since two of his greatest weapons, Omega and the Dark Elf, are gone.

In short, the timing, despite the Resistance Caravan’s circumstantial pains, is better than ever.

“There’s something I want to show you,” X tells Zero after the reploid rises from his capsule. “It’s extremely important.”

Zero raises an eyebrow under his helmet. “Okay. But first…”

He opens up a small metal cabinet sitting right next to his capsule and pulls out energy crystal tank. “I didn’t see you yesterday – “

“Stop. Don’t give that to me. Give it to the operator. They’ll need it to power up the Trans Server for us.”

“The Trans Server? Where are we going?”

“I’ll tell you when we go there.”

“Okay. But I’m still giving you this crystal. The Trans Server still has enough fuel –“

Suddenly X’s patience runs short. He snatches the tank from Zero’s hands, ignoring the reploid’s angry protest as he uses his limited power to open various doors on his way to the command center, Resistance members squawking in surprise as the machinery within the caravan walls making way for the local ghost.

“X, what are you doing!? You shouldn’t be wasting your energy like that!” Zero calls after the cyber elf furiously.

X ignores him. He tosses the energy crystal tank up to the bewildered operator – a recent addition to the Resistance - by the Trans Server and commands, “Please set coordinates to -27.0 27.499998.”

“Yes sir!” the young operator squeaks, eager to please. His hands quickly fly over the control panel. “Coordinates set! Transfer is ready for you, sir!”

X gracefully flies over to the teleportation platform. “Zero, please come here.”

“Not until you tell me what’s going on. Before I wouldn’t question but right now you’re not acting like yourself!“

_Oh this poor child._

“You don’t know what you’re talking about and I will show you why. If you don’t get on this platform right now, I’ll go off by myself and not come back. And by the time you come after me, I’ll be completely dead,” X says bluntly.

Zero stares at the deceitfully young face of the legendary hero, the true ruler of Neo Arcadia, the Blue Messiah - and can decipher nothing from those expressionless features.

“Fine,” Zero bites off finally, climbing on top of the platform right next to X. “But once we get back, you’re going to eat five ECs, understand? Believe in Ciel. Her substitute energy will work so try not to deliberately disappear until then.”

“If that’s what you want,” X lies calmly.

“Um,” the operator starts hesitantly. “Transferring in three…two…one!”

Both cyber elf and warrior vanish in a light.

*

“The history you know is abridged and edited thanks to propaganda and canonization. I’m going to tell you what truly happened before and after your activation. It’s a long tale so please bear with me.”

Their destination is abandoned buildings overrun by nature and concrete roads in jagged pieces like a sad salute. Air quality is overall better than desert and Zero can feel the hum of his internal ventilators quiet down gradually now that it has less dust to filter through. He silently follows X through this green and grey maze of another broken down city.

“After the fall of Eurasia, I fought my best friend in its ruins,” X starts after a while of navigating through the ghostly streets. “Thanks to Sigma’s interference, the robot named Zero was able to recover some of his previously lost memories as well as his access to cyber space. For the longest time the Maverick Hunters couldn’t crack down on the virus properly because we were looking for its source at the wrong place.”

The corners of X’s lips twitch. “In nature, there are poisonous plants that sit right next to its antidote. After Zero died, I took his remains to a human scientist, Dr. Freese for further study upon the virus. The Mother Elf, our breakthrough into curing the virus, was born from reverse engineering Zero’s body.”

 _Why are you referring to me as if I’m not here?_ Zero wants to ask but kept his mouth shut. There’s something about X right now that it doesn’t feel right to interrupt.

“The next step was Operation Helicopter Parents. Dr. Freese’s joke. Because the reploid race was born from using me as a template, the Abel Tribune called me the Father of all Reploids in one of their newspapers and the label stuck. Father Reploid and Mother Elf: the combination team to end the Maverick Wars once and for all.”  

X stops in front of used to be a building. It’s reduced down to its standing pillars and wire frame, the space within its bounds nothing but a small mountain of debris.

“Then someone stole Zero’s body and turned the only android I ever called my friend into a monster by ‘waking him up.’ The head scientist of the government’s weapon department at the time.”

The cyber elf phases raise his hand towards the base of the waste mound. In a flash of light nearby ragged wrecks of machinery croak up and stutter into action. Concrete, glass and plaster are peeled away, pieces of metal with a circuit tumbling away until a comfortable hole is made.

There, buried under all the construction garbage, are stairs.

X disappears and Zero startles, quickly descending down the steps. At one point the stairs are broken off into the darkness below, but Zero can see a small speck of fluctuating light. He clicks his tongue and jump off, and falls down, down, down, to what seems like an abyss until he lands on dirt and dust right behind X again.

Then X vanishes again.

“X, what are you doing?” Zero demands as his eyes automatically adjust to night vision. There’s a hallway in front of him and he walks forward.

“Weil abused the power of the cyber elves to repair Zero’s body and brought him back online,” X’s voice echoes from somewhere further down the hallway. “But by then Zero was no longer Zero. Weil wanted to have the perfect weapon that would obey his every command, so he installed a program to control him by locking his growth. That way, Zero couldn’t adapt the will to overcome it.”

“Still, Omega with his hundreds of years of memories, experience, and control of the virus was more than enough to overpower and contaminate the Mother Elf. The Mother Elf became the Dark Elf and more than doubled Omega’s power and range. So the Elf Wars began and the casualties rose even higher than the previous Maverick Wars.”

Zero skids to a stop as X reappears in front of him mid-run, though X wasn’t looking at Zero but at a pair of thick metal sliding doors with a dangling control pad by its side.

This time Zero reaches for his Z-Saber by his hip but he’s too late, X already forces the doors to open and statics in and out of existence again.

“Stop using your energy carelessly,” Zero scolds again though it feels so small compare to the weight of the tale X is telling him.

X finally looks at the reploid and musters up a sad smile. “You won’t care so much about me after I show you this.”

Zero steps into the large room after X and finds it lacking. Dusty computer screens, unused control consoles, and shattered shelves. It just looks like another rundown lab, though at the very center there is a monstrosity of tangled cables dangling uselessly from the ceiling.

Then it comes to Zero. He does know this space.

If there was more light and invasive greenery, this would look just like the underground lab facility that Ciel woke him up in.

“There was another project that was happening at the same as the Cyber Elf Project. One that only very few individuals knew,” X whispers. “One that Dr. Freese also actively participated in. A collaboration between her and Dr. Cain to make a successful second attempt on Project Alpha.”

Project Alpha. Zero knows this. Something, something about the ultimate reploid - where did he heard it?

Wait. Why does he know it?

Zero’s poking around in the void of his mind where his memories are supposed to be and grits his teeth when he can’t get anything. He's getting tired of not knowing what he's supposed to know.

“It’s okay if you’re not sure what it is. You weren’t supposed to know it,” X says almost wistfully.

X goes to the electronic mess at the center of the room and lays a hand over one of the thicker, almost fully insulated tubes protruding from it.

“After all, the first attempt of Project Alpha failed and so the resulted reploids believed they were failures. Those poor kids…it wasn’t their fault. I used to wonder…if Colonel and Iris didn’t know they were built to be me then perhaps Colonel wouldn’t have overcompensated for his pride so much. It would have saved so much heartache during the fourth war.”

Zero raises his head sharply to the cyber elf next to him. “Who…?”

X shakes his head. “I digress. So. Dr. Freese and Dr. Cain tackled on Project Alpha again but this time instead of trying to make the ultimate reploid based on my example they tried to make an ultimate reploid more like Zero. But they were intrigued by the psychic bond that Colonel and Iris had. They believed that with the right measures and the right partner, giving a dependency link onto the new reploid could prevent it from going Maverick later.”

X’s hands fall together in front of him, wringing together.

“More directive-orientated. A light suffering circuit accompanied with only basic ethics knowledge. Like Omega, this combat reploid would have less empathy than the average reploid so it wouldn’t suffer from moral paradoxes later down the line. No Three Laws of Robotics, because some humans do deserve to be terminated.”

“And the target for the dependency link would be someone who has a credible history of being incredibly survivable, some who both Dr. Freese and Dr. Cain can trust to…consistently stay as a solid moral compass.”

X gives a quiet humorless laugh as he grabs his chest, a hand over an invisible heart.

“They weren’t wrong. Two hundred years fighting and even I’m surprised that my processor hasn’t broken yet. But I was _so_ close. If I didn’t seal the Dark Elf away and continued ruling Neo Arcadia, I would end up just like that wretched copy but I’d be _way_ worse.”

Zero usually doesn’t care to think of what-ifs. So many other reploids and humans would wistfully think of an alternate world where they weren't suffering but Zero knows there's better things to do than imagine.

Yet his combat protocols immediately kicked in to calculate how much of a threat a broken X could have been. A veteran Maverick Hunter with centuries of experience in warfare combined with the Infinite Potential System endlessly compounding strength…

X was basically a physical god before he gave birth to the Guardians. If X wanted to conquer the world he wouldn’t even need to try very hard.   

Temperature has not suddenly dropped in the room and yet Zero feels like his body activated extra coolant as if gearing up for a fight. Is this what some of the humans means when they feel shivers when they think of something that terrifies them?

A flicker of light and Zero barely suppresses the reflex to sucker punch the movement in front of him. Not like it would have hurt X at all.

The cyber elf tilts his head, unnaturally bright green eyes combing over Zero’s face.

“Huh. It’s earlier than I expected, but it seems your personality matrix has grown enough for detailed abstractions now. Or perhaps it is because you’re relating it to combat that your processor considers it a strategical necessity to expand?”

X blinks.

“Oh, sorry about that. That was the scientist in me. I used to be a researcher for Cain Labs before I became a Maverick Hunter. It comes out from time to time.”

Zero visibly bristles and before he could stop it his thoughts spill out.

“I get it. I’m starting to understand what you’re telling me. I’m the ‘ultimate reploid’ of Project Alpha, and you’re the person I was designed to have a dependency link on.”

Then his eyes widen and he takes a step back from the ghost in front of him. “Does that mean…this entire time you could read my mind? That you had this power over me?!”

Recalculating rates of survival – percentage drastically lowered because of this pressing vulnerability.

Recommended action: destroy the source.

_NO NO NO NO NO_

“Zero, calm down!”

Impossibly, Zero feels a weight in front of him, and when the system errors and warnings recede from his mind, he can see X’s arms blanketing around him.

“I’m sorry, I should have expected that. That’s why I’ve decided to tell you the truth. I’m going to fix this.”

“You…you’re physical,” Zero manages out. He can feel X’s cassock, the fabric thinly hiding a soft body beneath it.

No armor. No threat. Zero’s body calms down despite him. A part of his mind screams that the threat hasn’t been lessened just because the threat isn’t equipped with Titanium-X armor at the moment, but it continues to fall lower and lower in priority. 

“Not really. I’m cheating,” X admits as he tightens his hug as if to convince Zero he’s not going anywhere – _the liar, he's so determined to leave Zero alone to carry his will_. “I can’t read your mind, but I know what has gone into your design and I’ve watched you enough to make some accurate guesses at what you’re thinking. Thanks to the link though, I can trick your senses into feeling this. I should have done this sooner. You deserve to know what a hug is.”

“I know what a hug is,” the reploid responds petulantly, like a child. 

“But you never had one until now.” X nestles his head on Zero’s shoulder. “When Weil began his mass murders, you were considered to be activated early in your development in order to fight with me against Omega. But I knew that thrusting a newly built without undergoing the appropriate number of simulations into the battlefield is basically assisted suicide. So I commanded the Neo Arcadia research team at the time to not activate you and cornered Weil by myself. I was determined to kill him, and Weil believed that I would. If Weil couldn’t have the world, he rather the world be destroyed so he unlocked Omega's growth as his ‘final’ curse on the world.”

X relaxes his hold and pulls back, though his hands doesn’t leave Zero’s narrow shoulders.

“Without the lock acting as a mental buffer, Omega was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the infected reploids that he was connected to through the cyber network and the Dark Elf. The part of Omega that was my Zero became corrupted under the will of the virus, twisted by his original programming to conquer the world for his late creator. As Dr. Light’s final creation, I became Omega’s sole target. He razed cities down in order to possess me.

“That was how I tricked him. I completed one of Weil’s early protoypes of an orbital satellite weapon – his take on the ‘Final Weapon’ – and got on a space shuttle with it. Omega thought I was pulling a Repliforce and planning to fire the Ragnarok from space. He tried to intercept the shuttle in midflight, but when he got within range, I…sacrificed hundreds of cyber elves to instantly reconfigure the ship to become his prison. I left Omega in space, went back to Earth and captured the Dark Elf.”

Zero’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “If he was separated from the Dark Elf, you could have finished him off by yourself. _I_ defeated him." And he's confident to say that he has less power than X. "You could have easily finished him off back then.”

Down deep underground like this Zero cannot hear any sounds from the surface. More than ever, the quiet sounds like a loud drone. 

X finally looks away.

“I was…naïve. I thought there was hope for my best friend to come back. I thought that after I help stabilize the world after the Elf Wars, create my Elysium, then I can refocus my effort to get Zero back.”

“You mean...you deliberately spared that monster’s life out of sentimentality!?”

The red reploid shakes off X’s hands and stomps forward, jabbing a finger on the cyber elf’s chest, snarling. “You weren’t just naïve, you were an idiot! The Elf Wars lasted for four years and approximately nine tenths of all reploids and three fifths of all humans were wiped out! And that’s not even including the deaths from the radiation, the famines, the diseases, and the energy crisis afterwards because of the wars!”

Zero doesn’t need Ciel’s data to know that Omega’s kill count soared beyond hundreds of millions by the end of the wars – hell, X was there to witness it all! And X still couldn’t raise the blasted buster to that monster’s fragging processor!

And scrap X for not reacting, for just wordlessly standing there while Zero yells at him like a mechanaloid!

“Yes I was a fool. I have no excuses for what I’ve done,” X says finally in the noisy silence once Zero settles down. “I loved Omega. My hope to have him back was what kept me motivated after the Elf wars. But even those affections dwindled after the sheer amount of tragedy I had to work through. Not killing Omega and abusing you are my greatest regrets.”  

Zero shakes his head, frustrated but not upset. What's done is done. Again, action weighs over alternate re-imaginings remain a prerogative. “It’s…fine. I was designed to be a combat reploid. Fighting for you and Ciel is just carrying out my directive.”

Now it’s X’s turn to disagree. “You misunderstand. I don’t mean the battles that you had to fight after your activation. After the Elf Wars, I took charge of Project Alpha and changed its goal. Instead of attempting to create the ultimate reploid based on Commander Zero’s template I aimed to make Zero. A Copy Zero.”

X bowed his head. “You were fed simulation after simulation of any archives of Zero and his combat routines, of my memories of him. You were a child and I took away your freedom by restraining your personality matrix and data base to be molded after a dead android. I never gave you the choice to be you.”

All of a sudden the rows of computer screens in the lab light up around them. Zero’s eyes dart to each screen – lines of code that he recognizes that make up his subroutines, his body schematics, oceans of databases referencing to specific, minor events from eras before him, so many memory records…

“You were so close to becoming a suitable vessel for Omega to return into. A body that he can use that wouldn’t have any connection to the virus anymore,” X continues calmly as if Zero’s insides aren’t casually spread out and revealing every single secret of his design around the cyber elf. “Then I learned that Weil survived. That madman used the virus nanites to create himself an armor during the wars, but it unpredictably adapted to his biological signature and transformed him into a nigh invulnerable cyborg. Isolating Weil and making him stay as far away from the Dark Elf took priority.”

“The rest of this story you vaguely know. Neo Arcadia exiled Weil into the Forbidden Ark outside of Earth’s orbit. Scattered remnants of the virus still existed and I continued retiring mavericks, gradually not caring about fighting enemies anymore. No longer hoping to have my best friend anymore. That’s when I realized that I was on a fast track to becoming a monster myself and used my body to seal the Dark Elf away.”

X’s hand rises to caress Zero’s cheek. “But you were still linked to me. So I tried unmaking you. I transferred you to another lab facility where the Neo Arcadia research team couldn’t find you. Your armor, your memories, your knowledge – everything Zero that I forced on you I tore apart for my Guardians to utilize.”

Harpuia’s saber dexterity, Fefnir’s hand-to-hand self-defense system, Leviathan’s ranged combat tactics, and Phantom’s pragmatism. Looking back, no wonder Zero won against X’s Guardians, if he already had some sort of innate knowing to their fighting styles.

“You ended up as an unfinished reploid with a disassembled identity linked to your abuser. You didn’t deserve anything I’ve done to you.”

“You make yourself sound way more terrible than you actually are,” the reploid designated Zero answers quietly. “You’re apologizing for something I’m not aware of.”

“Perhaps. But like I said, I’ll fix this.”

The hand on Zero’s face rises up with X’s other hand and the cyber elf grabs the sides of Zero’s helm.

“The only reason you haven’t suffered any drawbacks from our link is because I never strayed too far from you long enough for you to develop any side-effects.” X’s hands start glowing. "Even after my consciousness became a cyber elf, I stayed close to you. Preparing for your activation when Ciel made her copy of me. Leading her to you and watching over you as you fight for us. Unknowingly, you were influenced by this link. Obediently following a stranger's beliefs modeled after my own, heeding all of my orders, following my moral philosophy without understanding it, less alone feeling it..."

A heat climbing so quickly that Zero’s hands reach up to reflexively pull X away, but there’s nothing there, X isn’t physical anymore - 

“But once I use up all my energy, I’ll truly die. You’ll break like Iris did. I won't let such a cruel fate happen to you.”

Pressure, too much pressure, warning WARNING – override – authorization permitted, edits allowed, function updateNavigator, var X = 1 changed to 0, code adapting –

“W-wait, X stop!” Zero – _not Zero not Zero no more Zero_ – struggles out as his entire world is being rewritten within seconds, he didn’t understand how much he cared, how secured he truly was with himself until he feels the spaces growing and _X must have been wrong_ because his suffering circuit can’t possibly be a lighter model if he can feel _this_.

“The least I can do is free you from me.”

Deactivated data reigniting and deleting just as fast, all translated in series of fleeting emotions and images flashing across his mind – a brighter lit laboratory with a view over to the sky, gentle green eyes that tactical immediately declared as a threat but the helmet isn’t there, an intimidating reploid with no pupils declaring Zero will be a Hunter, an incomplete reploid who wondered if she can gain independence if she was with Zero more and with her brother less, fighting, _so much fighting and it stopped being fun because what was his purpose what was his directive what was he even fighting for_   

“STOP, PLEASE X!”

 _tried to love her, tried to love them, tried to love them all, tried to be more like_ you _, couldn’t, not possible, still tried to be better and that meant choosing you, I always chose you and your beliefs, I’m less than nothing, I take away, destruction to deconstruct, fundamental given, I was never was a hero all I did was follow orders but you made me curious made me want to see Elysium, took everything not to kill you and this world and in the end I fell to it anyway I’m so sorry I failed you I’m so sorry X_

Under the shadow of Omega’s ancient agony, the reploid called Zero screams.

*

They wake up from the ground. Internal chronometer states they have been in emergency sleep mode for half the day. Concerned com pings and unread voice messages piling up in a mental corner of his processor. Subtanks used to fuel the new information integration. Supply dangerously low. The last thing they remember is…  

“X?” They whispered.

“I’m still here.”

X is sitting right by their side but they missed him because he can barely maintain his form. It’s just like that time in the desert after they defeated Copy X the first time but considerably worse. The cyber elf constantly statics in and out of existence, like he’s barely holding onto reality.

“How are you feeling?” X asks.

_Horrible._

They looked away.

“I was fine before but now…you didn’t free me, you took everything away from me. I remember even less than before. This is just like when – “

When who? There – there was someone, someone important, then they were gone, it feels like that? Maybe?

“If I wasn’t broken before, I’m definitely broken now,” the young reploid whimpered, curling into themself. “I have less. I am less. All I remember is Ciel activating me and everything onwards, but even if it was little I knew had more than that. I feel like there’s half of me missing.”

They're actively going through their personal databases referring to themself. Only the result "Zero" pops up, alluding to what everyone has been calling them after their activation. If they didn't feel like "Zero" before, they definitely feel less so no.

“Y-you’ll get used to i-it.” X’s voice is unstable as he continues blinking out of reality, the blinks’ increasing frequency a cause of alarm. “’Besides thee is th-the ocean, ti – nothing is more frightful than infini-infinity. –Felt itself free, th-there is no land any longer.’”

They glare at X. At least they haven’t forgotten how weird and annoyingly cryptic the ancient android can be.

“An o-old quo – “ Couldn’t finish the word, the blinks are getting longer.

“Let’s hurry back to base,” they answered. Despite everything, they do care about X to some degree. That’s still there. That belongs to them and not just to the old Zero, they’re sure about it. “The crystals should stabilize you.”

“No…I-I’ve u-used everything…”

“X, please,” they replied wearily, already sick and tired and just done, so done. “I may not be a hero, but at least I can help you.”

“Don’t say – y’ – are a-a…”

“No I’m not. I was just a copy of the legendary Zero.” They grimace. “I don’t deserve the name Zero.”

The cyber elf shuts his eyes close, concentrating. The red reploid watches X’s form stabilizing a bit more, just enough that when he speaks it doesn’t stutter anymore.

“No, you don’t deserve the name Zero. You deserve more than that. You deserve to finally be yourself, without the chains of another person’s identity holding you down.”

X’s expression turns sheepish. “I know I’ve asked too much from you, but I do hope you’ve grown to care for this world and its people to protect it. Whoever you choose to be, whoever you grow to become…I hope I can trust this world to you. Not as the old Zero. But as you.”

It sounds like a final request. A true good-bye. The reploid nods shakily. After all, they've done nothing but fighting for a better world ever since they woke up. It's the only thing that is theirs. 

 _Maybe that's why he's doing this to me now,_ the reploid thinks bitterly.  _I've already done everything so far for him. Maybe he's confident that I won't stop._

“You can believe in me.”

For the first time in decades, X gives a genuine smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to bug me about Megaman X and Zero, I'm always ready to word vomit about this series.
> 
> The quote X mentions at the end is from Nietzsche, specifically his aphorisms of “the little ship” and “the poor bird,” both of which have an interpretation of relating the feeling one gets once they lose the society-conditioned morals they’ve developed once they realize those values don’t belong to them.
> 
> Dr. Freese is a name I made up for Ciel’s ancestor aka the one who developed the Mother Elf. Name based on Ciel’s association with Freesia flowers, as well as the actual Dr. Freese was a botanicist, which pairs nicely with Dr. Cain’s occupation.


End file.
